TASK 3

DESIGNERS SELF-PROMOTING PROJECTS

TEAM 505 

- David Benski has a aesthetic and direction that is very similar to what I strive for 

- Approaches things with a fresh, fine art, collage perspective that looks to layering, dimensions and moulding together print and digital 

- Team 505 is a studio created with him and other creatives that focusses on self-initiated projects and commercial projects. Set up under the studio name is also Sub Press, which is a publishing house that publishes self-initiated projects 

- Their website presents these projects in an interesting video with a very DIY aesthetic of pulling around different windows and tabs, a recording of someone interacting with their own desktop 

- There's a real love for print that is present in the creation of the publishing house Sub Press, and the website shows the immense amount of work and its diversity in a very unapologetic 'this is us' way 

- You feel like you're there looking through their project files with them  

> Entity to present their self-initiated projects 

> Print that visually explores passions and ideas 

REJANE DAL BELLO 

- Always followed her work as ethics is a central part to her practice 

- Was an important stage in my design practice to find designers and studios that had this ethos and to understand how and why to apply it to my own 

- Produced Dr Giraffe series to help kids understand about illness and diseases, such as leukaemia

- Written a book that collates all of her lectures and thoughts on life, graphic design and doing good in the world, and how ethics and helping should come first before doing graphic design 

- All design utilises simplicity and boldness to communicate a message instantly

- Both of these projects are in helping people and as a result it has an emotional loving charge to it that many commercial projects don't have 

> ethics

> doing good for others 

STUDIO CLAUS DUE 

- lots of self-initiated projects that are led from a place of keen interest in an idea, concept or image 

- Reenactment — Hommage á Cadere. The project originates back to an “analogue Pinterest board” that Claus keeps to pin up images that he finds interesting. One image in particular struck the designer; a photograph of a Polish-Romanian artist named André Cadere carrying a striped, wooden bar while wearing a striped t-shirt. André would carry this wooden bar wherever he went as a kind of “lifelong performance” while attempting to establish himself in the art world during the 1970s. Claus grew an increasing fascination with André (otherwise known as the “stick man”), thinking about him for more than a year until the designer fabricated a personal project around this lifelong performance.

In collaboration with the Danish fashion designer Mads Nørgaard who is also interested in the arts as well as stripes, the two creatives team together to reenact Cadere’s performance. Claus and Mads gathered “the best people [they] could find to help” on the project including the artists FOS, Lilibeth Cuenca and performances by Elmgreen and Dragset. The project culminated in a performance staged in front of hundreds of people with an accompanying newspaper and giant posters erected throughout Copehagan.

Another personal project is 49 landscapes, 73 bears and the Skinned Head of a Young Bull which came about as an extension of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark. The museum asked 15 people in different fields of design to start a visual dialogue with one of the artworks from the collection. However, Claus became so enamoured with “all kinds of weird, small elements of the paintings that normally go unnoticed” resulting in the design of a book cataloguing these features. The designer relays how the project was “so much fun… picking 112 paintings from the collection,” and setting a weeklong brief to map out these details which includes the number of cats and dogs, different kinds of hats and all the dead Queens that can be found in the artworks. The book documents Claus’ “personal admiration of the paintings” and can be seen as a “layman’s way of categorising art.”

- These use the opinions and input from other people which makes them so interesting, as you're seeing how it becomes a performance or enactment on other peoples' stories and opinions

- Each step takes him on a new idea and development of a concept, with inspiration along the way from other artists and people

- It doesn't have to necessarily do anything apart from encourage people to think about things in different ways  

- Showing these different perspectives and using performance and a range of outputs to formulate a concept is very interesting, and takes quite a fine art direction with the use of graphic design 

- Taking graphic design out into the world and involving people 

- Taking the concept further 

IDEA FOR SELF-PROMOTING PROJECT 

1 Publication on Sex 

> Visual exploration on the feeling and experience of sex through the physicality and tactile nature of a book 

2 Women's Toilets 

> Exploration into the world of the women's public toilets: compliments, stories and experiences shared between strangers and friends. A space of support, recollection and intimacy 

3 Comic Strip: The Right Outfit 

> The struggle behind choosing an outfit for a night out. Comic Book style presentation of this process

4 Logo Everyday on Website 

> New interesting different visuals of presenting initials 'MH' on my portfolio website. Could change everyday.